Keyword Landscape Analysis
Last update: 2020-11-01
1 Introduction
filled out by Daniel
2 Methodology
partly filled out by Daniel;
Data preparation
Searches with volume 0 are removed from the data set. For AHREF analysis, only searches with volume > 100 are looked at. Analyses are based on US location.
Data enrichment
~2.5 million searches were enriched with AHREF. This includes the statistics difficulty, return rate, clicks, click per search (cps), region volume, and SERP features.
Overview of the data
| Statistic | Value |
|---|---|
| Total number of searches | ~306 million |
| Total volume of searches | ~303 billion |
| Searches with missing volume | 0.51% |
| Mean search volume | 989 |
| Median search volume | 10 |
| Mean CPC | 0.61 |
3 Research Findings
Questions in searches
~14% of searches are in the form of a question. “how” is the most common question word
Stopwords
“how” and “the” are the most common stopwords, which are present in 6-8% of searches.
Keyword length
The most searched queries have length 6-9 characters, and falls continuously for search queries longer or shorter than that.
Keyword info categories
Internet & Telecom is the keyword category with the highest mean volume
Arts & Entertainment, Internet & Telecom, and News, Media & Publications have the highest total volume
Finance has the highest mean cost per click
Keyword difficulty
As volume increases, the difficulty increases.
From linear regression we find that for each doubling of the volume, the difficulty increases by 1.63
Difficulty and CPC are also correlated:
spell types
Most of the searches with the highest volumes are attempts to go to a popular website.
| keyword | location | spell | spell_type | keyword_info_search_volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| jou tube | 2840 | youtube | showing_results_for | 1.85e+08 |
| youtube the | 2840 | 1.85e+08 | ||
| youi tue | 2840 | youtube | showing_results_for | 1.85e+08 |
| acerook | 2840 | 1.85e+08 | ||
| youetube | 2840 | 1.85e+08 | ||
| you tbut | 2840 | youtube | did_you_mean | 1.85e+08 |
| ykutube | 2840 | youtube | showing_results_for | 1.85e+08 |
| uotod | 2840 | youtube | showing_results_for | 1.85e+08 |
| utuen | 2840 | youtube | did_you_mean | 1.85e+08 |
| ytu tube | 2840 | 1.85e+08 |
As a result about half of all volume has a spell type. Although only ~1.4% of searches have a spell type.
The most popular websites that are redirected from misspelling:
| spell | volume |
|---|---|
| youtube | 35.3% |
| 8.7% | |
| amazon | 7.6% |
| 6.3% | |
| weather | 2.2% |
| translate | 1.6% |
| com | 1.5% |
| 1.3% | |
| walmart | 1.3% |
| ebay | 1.2% |
Search volume
The top 2000 searches have extremely high volume, while the vast majority of the rest of the searches is very low volume.
Note that many of these extremely high volume searches are not a search for something as such, but an attempt to go to one of the popular sites above.
SERP features
(Note there are (at least) two additional SERP feature types (Knowledge Panel and Videos), for which the sample size is too small to include.)
The SERP features featured in the most searches are Image pack and People also ask:
The knowledge card has a huge effect in reducing the clicks-per-search, while the other SERP features have limited effect. Searches with the Shopping results SERP feature have higher cps on average.
Low difficulty keywords have fewer SERP features
Thumbnail & Top stories is the most common SERP feature pairing
Searches without SERP features tend to be low volume
Return rate
We can see that searches with high return rates tend to have lower difficulty, and to be clicked on a lot more.
| return_rate | mean_cpc | mean_clicks | mean_difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| very high | 0.96 | 71423 | 18.4 |
| low | 0.70 | 15094 | 25.6 |
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